Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Looking through social media, it appears there
are still a number of people who don’t seem to understand why some of us are
afraid of what the new presidential entourage means. Now, first of all, I just
want to say that there is a part of me that is happy for you if you can’t work
out why we’re scared. I hope you never feel the sense of hopeless vulnerability
that we are experiencing. At the same time, however, I’m deeply disturbed by
the lack of empathy, and hope against hope that your children never have cause
to feel this way.

Have you come across, or even shared, this
little gem:

“I keep seeing people post on how they are
terrified, or scared? Well.. what are you scared of exactly? War? Because
that's happening. School shootings? Because that's happening. Pipeline? That's
been happening. Terrorism? Definitely alive and well. Going broke due to health
insurance? Mm yes. Corruption throughout the system? Already there. Police
officers being murdered? Yep, that's happening. Bullying? Check. Loss of jobs?
We've got that on lock. A tanking economy. Yep. Being discriminated against for
your religion, political views, sexual orientation, race? That's been going on.
Rape, murder, violence, riots.. all going on and has been.
So tell me, what are you scared of that is not already happening basically
everywhere? This isn't a Trump problem, this is a people problem. Y'all need to
reevaluate your own selves..
Maybe America is a little too scared and a little too easily offended.
Quit being scared, crying around, offended by everything.. step up and do your
part as an American, no, as a damn human being. Treat others with respect, help
and encourage one another, raise your kids right, be a contributing member of
society. Make sure your hands are clean, that's your job. Burning the American
flag? Get out of here with that crap, how about you do your job to make it a
better place.
But right now, all I see is hate. It's disturbing, and the ones with the most
hate are being exactly what they claim to be against.”

Maybe America is a little too scared and a little too easily offended.
Quit being scared, crying around, offended by everything.. step up and do your
part as an American, no, as a damn human being. Treat others with respect, help
and encourage one another, raise your kids right, be a contributing member of
society. Make sure your hands are clean, that's your job. Burning the American
flag? Get out of here with that crap, how about you do your job to make it a
better place.
But right now, all I see is hate. It's disturbing, and the ones with the most
hate are being exactly what they claim to be against.”
Maybe America is a little too scared and a little too easily offended.
Quit being scared, crying around, offended by everything.. step up and do your
part as an American, no, as a damn human being. Treat others with respect, help
and encourage one another, raise your kids right, be a contributing member of
society. Make sure your hands are clean, that's your job. Burning the American
flag? Get out of here with that crap, how about you do your job to make it a
better place.
But right now, all I see is hate. It's disturbing, and the ones with the most
hate are being exactly what they claim to be against.”

Apparently written by someone under the name
Scott Strader on Facebook. Isn’t social media liberating?

Ok, so let’s see if we can break this down,
shall we? I’ll keep it as short as I can.

War, school shootings, terrorism, corruption,
loss of jobs. Yes, all that is happening, and will continue to happen, and if
you’re not the least bit scared about how normalized they’ve become, then you
are definitely part of the problem. Besides, do we really want a man who has
filed for bankruptcy six times? Ok, possibly not every case was entirely his fault, after all the casino
business hit a rough patch. Sort of like a country that’s been in a recessionfor a few years. Has anyone informed him that filing a chapter 11 for America would be a very
bad idea?

Health insurance. Do you truly believe that a man
who refuses to pay his bills actually cares for the common person? He is big business all the way, and that
means the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies have an ally to
support them as they continue to bleed us dry. Obamacare is anything but perfect, but
millions of Americans rely on it to insure themselves and their families. And yes, that’s just one of
the many things Trump has backed down on it, but it remains a fact that the threat
was very real, and very scary, and remains scary, to a large number of at-risk
people.

Pipeline. Yes, we’ve been fighting the pipeline
that is endangering the lives of Americans and threatening the sanctity of the
environment. The fact that Trump received a sizeable bribe donation from
the CEO of the company that wants to rape the landendanger lives
install a massive, dangerous pipeline despite the ongoing issues with the line
already in place, is just one sign that he doesn’t mind selling off ourchildren’s future. Another
sure sign that he is completely out of touch with environmental concerns is
that he appointed a person who sounds more like a conspiracy theorist than a
profession as the head of the EPA.

Police officers being murdered. Sorry to say,
but without comprehensive gun reform, this will continue to happen.

Bullying, rape, discrimination. You just
described the newest leader of our country.

But honestly, we’re not afraid of Trump. I’ve
never met a President, and I don’t intend on starting now. It is a frightening
thought that he will be shaping policies that will affect us for decades to
come. Looking at who he’s appointing to his cabinet, the threat of loss of
civil rights that have been fought for over lifetimes is all but ensured, and
that’s not good news either. But the terror that is filling so many Americans
isn’t entirely about him.

So what are we afraid of?

We are afraid of a world where school children
chant, “Build the wall!” While their classmates cry and the teachers don’t do
anything to stop it. *

We are afraid of a country where a black woman,
filling her car with gas, is accosted by three men who pull a gun on her and
tell her they could “kill her right now and nothing bad would happen because
she’s just a piece of meat.”*

We are afraid of a place where two school girls
can get on a bus and tell the blacks they belong at the back of the bus because
Trump’s President now. *

We are afraid of a society where a white woman
jogging on the morning following the election passes by a group of men and when
one yells out, “Who owns your pussy now?” no one says anything. *

We are afraid of people who think it’s
perfectly acceptable to send a Mexican man a terrorist note made out of letters
cut from magazines and pasted to a piece of paper telling him to leave the
country. *

In a word: You. We are afraid of the people who
are either so self-centered, or downright malicious as to have the gall to ask
that question. We are afraid of the people who voted in hatred, live in hatred,
and continue to treat the rest of us like we are the ones that forced this
horror on our country. We are afraid of people who saw a sexual predator and
decided he would be a good role model for our sons and daughters.

You gave hate a voice. Now we all pay for it.

Yes, there are riots going on right now, and
that needs to stop. Did you know that in many cases it started as a peaceful
protest, a way of supporting each other while we process what has happened,
when some people who saw an opportunity for chaos descended? Did you realize
that the vast majority of protests are remaining peaceful? The only hate crimes
I’ve seen are those by people who loudly support Trump. By people who name
Trump as the reason they can hurt others without consequence. There are bad
decisions on both sides.

So right now, we are organizing, we are
filtering, we are supporting. Right now we are planning to stand up for
ourselves and those who cannot. Right now we are doing our job to make America
a better place by not sitting idly by while racism, bigotry, and misogyny rips
away at our core values.

If you are so offended by our honest and visceral
reaction to this, then maybe you need to try being honest with yourself. Maybe
it’s you who have not been “keeping your hands clean.”

To my fellow citizens, by brothers and sisters
who have been united by this ugly situation we’re in, stay strong. Fight with
love and tolerance no matter how dark the night. We stand together, we stand
strong.

*All of those stories are firsthand accounts I
read through a supportive group. This is what people are truly living through.

Friday, November 11, 2016

It was a wonderfully warm, but not too warm, day when my
parents broke the news to me that Santa wasn’t real.

I was 8 years old and I think it was sometime in early
November, but I can’t be certain. I think it was after we’d had a simple lunch
at the table. I only remember a slight feeling of shock, then, upon seeing how
much they struggled with the words, I decided to think more about it later and
said the words I thought would make them feel better, to stop their frowns. I
remember being acutely aware of people, especially adults, that Christmas
season. Trying to make sense of this new world that I’d suddenly been plunged
into. A world where magic didn’t exist.

I rejected that thought. Magic was still real, and I saw it
all around me once I cared enough to look.

It was years later before my dad took it all back. “Santa
does exist,” he told me, “it’s just… different.” He didn’t need to. “I know,” I
said, “I’ve always known.”

When it came my own child’s turn to hear that magic was
fake, he got a wholly different speech: “Santa is not some dude that flies
around the world delivering presents to good kids, it’s the spirit of peace and
love that inspires people to be better to each other. That spirit that inspires
us to help the less fortunate. Santa is real; he’s just not a jolly fat guy in
red. “

It’s the spirit of tranquility that makes adults not hate
each other quite as much as usual. Bring on the Christmas season! We need it
now more than ever.

I’ve been struggling with this election. I’ve tried to close
myself off from the world, because the world is an ugly, dangerous place right
now. I honestly did not expect my own reaction, but the fear that has gripped
me since Tuesday night has been intense. I thought it wouldn’t really matter to
me who won, who our next President was, I just wanted the campaign over.

How wrong I was.

I think it’s because I truly believed that America was
better. That we still had enough human decency to not elect such an obviously
dangerous person.

My family is not on the front lines, not entirely. We’re “white,”
so that’s our protection. We’re not Christian, my son and I have mental
illnesses, my husband and step-daughter are immigrants, and I’m not strictly
heterosexual. We’re not on the front lines, but we’re not far back.

I’m scared. I’m scared of what could happen. And I can’t trust
anyone.

People I thought were my friends, people I thought cared
about my family voted against our safety. They voted, almost with fanatical
relish, to put my family in danger. That is something that I can’t forgive, and
it’s going to take a long time before I can be nice again. It will take a long
time for the resentment to ebb. Probably until I know we’ll be safe, which may
be never. We may never again feel safety, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.

I’m trying not to hate these people; people I thought of as
friends. People I thought I was protecting by voting for the lesser of two
evils. People who fed me to the fire. So far, you may have guessed, I’ve
failed. Hate is filling me so entirely that I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I haven’t
done either properly since the election. Food tastes bad, sleep is filled with
monsters. I’m waiting. Waiting for the next threat to show itself.

And every time I see the face of our new dictator, all I see
is my own demon- the one person who’s very thought still sends me into a panic
attack nearly 14 years later. A few weeks ago I sat in a lawyer’s office trying
to explain, and completely lost control. I sat there and sobbed, humiliated at
my own weakness. Trump is a trigger to many of us survivors. The fact that he’s
a self-confessed sexual predator isn’t really the issue- there’s plenty of them
around. The fact that he’s a self-confessed sexual predator in a position of
power isn’t even the issue- there’s plenty of them, too. The issue is that so
many of our neighbors and supposed friends said that it doesn’t matter. That we
don’t matter. They agree that women are there to be objects, that we don’t
count. That we somehow asked for this. That complacency is the issue.

I saw a comment stating that not all Trump supporters are
racists. Not all Trump supporters hate women. But does it really matter? You
voted for a man that gave the scum of our country carte blanche. It’s all ok,
because our President does it!

It’s not ok. It will never be ok. It’s as far from ok as you
can possibly get.

There was a woman in my co-op who absolutely horrified me.
She claimed she was voting for Trump because she had to vote with her conscience.

It’s your conscience to rape women?

It’s your conscience to torture innocents?

It’s your conscience to kill people that look different from
you?

It’s your conscience to deny every ideal we’ve based our
country on?

It’s your conscience to plunge the earth into an
environmental disaster that we may never recover from?

If that’s true, I’m not sure I want to share the same space
as you. This isn’t about politics anymore, it’s about humanity. People who have
put their humanity on hold because some demagogue has promised them the holy
grail. It’s about the fact that your conscience includes the mass destruction
of everyone who doesn’t believe the same overused tripe you do.

For those of us who have lived our lives on the edge of
outright dissension, it is terrifying that one manipulative megalomaniac can
wield so much power over our disenfranchised populace as to put us into actual
physical harm. The world may not be ending, but it has certainly changed, irreparably,
for the worse.

So what now? A lot of people are asking that, but nobody
seems to have a very good answer. “Keep fighting,” seems hollow when everything
we’ve been doing has failed. “Do more,” is even worse when we’re so tired from
the battles we’ve waged over months and ended in the message that we are
worthless, we don’t matter.

The thorn? Clinton won. At the time of this writing, the
votes are 99% counted and Clinton is in the popular vote lead by 395,050. That’s
a lot of people who have had their voices ripped from them.

So let me share another story.

I did not vote early because I didn’t know who to vote for.
I didn’t like any of my options. At 2pm central time on Tuesday, November 8th,
2016, I “forced” my son to go uptown with me to vote. I grilled my immigrant
husband, who is much more politically aware than I am since I’ve never tried to
pretend that my vote actually matters, who he thought I should attach my name
to, knowing full well that I hate Hillary Clinton and everything she
represents. I headed uptown, braving rain and flooded creeks, still not sure
who I should attach myself to. I’d read accounts and seen photos of women
voting for Hillary Clinton in tears because the thought of a woman president
was so incredible, so life affirming, that they could not contain their
emotions. It was a powerful message that they believed in so strongly that
their emotions over flowed unchecked in our patriarchal world that disdains
from such shows of weakness.

I voted for Hillary Clinton. And I nearly cried. But not for
the reason you’re expecting. I felt the tears threaten as I selected her from
the list, because I didn’t want her as my leader, but she had a better chance
than most at beating Trump- and anything is better than Trump. Present tense.

I was not and am not proud of my decision to kowtow to
popular demand and vote for someone I didn’t truly believe in- but let’s be
honest, I didn’t really believe in any of them, I was only voting against the
one I couldn’t live with in the strongest way I could. Not that it mattered. I
could have written in Cthulhu and it would’ve counted as much.

Because I don’t matter. Message read loud and clear.

Just for the record, I don’t support the anti-Trump riots. I
don’t think that’s the way out of this mess. I don’t what is, but I certainly
don’t think that’s it. But I understand it. When you take everything away from
people and leave them without any acceptable way to defend themselves and their
loved ones against hatred and injustice, they tend to react in violent ways. It’s
fear that fuels that reaction, and I hate to say it, but it’s not over yet. The
elites think people are easy to control when they’re denied basic rights, but
actually, when they have nothing left to lose, people become as untamable as
any jungle. There is no stopping the will of survival.

I have struggled my entire life with people interrupting me
when I speak, because I don’t matter. I try to limit my words, obviously not
easy for me, just to try to avoid people talking over the top of me. And yet, I
have literally been interrupted when saying, “Hello.” One word, unfinished,
because someone is so much more important than I am. And I have been forced to
accept that out of politeness. It’s what good girls do.

But it’s very difficult to combat racism, sexism, bigotry, and
hatred when your voice has been taken from you. When no one will give you the
opportunity to speak. When every effort to force your right to speech is met
with sexist derision.

So, this is my declaration. If you are afraid, so am I- we
can be afraid together. If you are angry, so am I- we can be angry together. If
you are confused, so am I- let’s figure this out together. If you have
forgiven, please teach us how, because we are struggling.

And if you voted for Trump, please try to understand that
right now we’re trying to find a way to forgive the betrayal, contempt, and
outright hatred. We’re trying to understand what is so offensive about wanting
equality. We’re trying to find our footing in this new world where hate is
encouraged, and intolerance is expected. We’re trying to decide how to teach
our daughters they’re still strong and our sons they still need to show respect
when the adults in control have shown the absolute opposite.

I don’t know how or if we can move forward from this. I don’t
know that I want to. Everyone I look at is an adversary; everyone I have to
deal with is plotting my downfall. Maybe it’s paranoia, but they just voted to
put it into action. Trump just kicked over that domino and I simply don’t know
who to trust. So, right now I’m trying to keep to myself and not piss too many
people off. But I am hurting, and it’s not going away any time soon.